Bryan Kohberger Never Had a Trial — and What His Defense Cost You Is Still Under Seal
The Bryan Kohberger case cost more than eight million dollars in public money. He confessed. There was no trial. And the people who paid for it have never been shown the full bill. This is the story of what happens when real money gets treated like it belongs to nobody.
Nearly five and a half million went to his defense — attorneys, experts, investigators — all on the public dime after he was ruled indigent. Prosecutors spent years pursuing the death penalty before it got dropped in a plea deal. A massive war machine built for a capital trial that never happened.
The defense spending sits in a sealed court file. A judge ordered parts of it unsealed. Kohberger’s lawyers objected to releasing any of it, lost, and appealed to the Idaho Supreme Court — billing the public for the effort. The case is over. The man confessed. There are no appeals on the conviction. And the receipts are behind a wall.
The smaller numbers are just as telling. A free house ran up three hundred forty-six thousand dollars in security and upkeep before they bulldozed it. One agency lost sixteen thousand in non-refundable hotel rooms while another agency, facing the identical situation, booked refundable and lost about thirteen hundred. Nobody stole anything. Nobody’s money was on the line, and so nobody protected it.
Convert the waste into what it could have been — scholarships, classrooms, resources at the same university those four students attended — and it gets hard to swallow. The victims’ families know exactly what a dollar is worth. They raise scholarship money by hand, in the names of the children they lost.
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Disclaimer
This publication contains commentary and opinion based on publicly available information. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Nothing published here should be taken as a statement of fact, health or legal advice.
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